Jewelry brand Frank Darling is opening more showrooms and a larger US factory

Frank Darling gained traction during the pandemic, when it was offering virtual consultations, but it is interacting more with customers in person as it grows. While 25% of Frank Darling’s business comes from online sales, the vast majority — 75% — traces back to its small-scale showrooms. There, shoppers make one-on-one appointments to see stones and rings they’ve already looked at online and have requested to be put aside. Notably, Frank Darling doesn’t keep large swaths of inventory in its showrooms; instead, it pairs a customer with a designer, who brings in pieces tailored to their preferences. The same designer stays with the customer throughout the whole process, “so it’s not a game of telephone,” Fisher said.

This personalized, more intimate strategy is paying off. Frank Darling’s showrooms host 1,400 consultations a month, and its new showrooms tend to be profitable within three months. With this model in place, Frank Darling is making “mid-seven figures” in revenue a month, Fisher explained. The company has been able to hire more people, going from three employees five years ago to 100 by the end of 2025.

Fisher described the brand’s approach as being attuned to what is an “extremely emotional purchase.” “We want people to feel like they’re going over their best friend’s house to look at diamonds,” Fisher said. “That’s a very different look and feel than places where you walk in and there are all these glass cases and you can’t touch anything. … For us, we just want it to be as comfortable and fun as possible.”

Buying items in person continues to be a popular path for many consumers, research shows. Gartner found that more than 70% of consumers say they’d rather shop in-store than online, Gartner senior director analyst Kassi Socha told Modern Retail. But, she said, “that doesn’t mean that every brand or retailer should open a large footprint today.”

“What it does mean,” she went on, “is that they should consider the connection between digital and offline and ensure points of differentiation.”

Most of Frank Darling’s showrooms are in New York City, where it opened a third location in the Flatiron district earlier this year. That showroom was “fully booked out of the gate,” Fisher said. After opening its showroom in Austin later this month, Frank Darling will put down roots in Miami, Philadelphia and Dallas. It looks to its online sales to decide where it wants to next establish a physical presence — and, as such, it’s considering future locations in the U.K., Canada and Australia.

While Frank Darling is targeting “doubling every year,” its founders don’t want to adopt a “growth-at-all-costs mentality” akin to the tech industry, Fisher said. “We’re pursuing responsible growth,” she said. “We’re not venture-backed — we’re bootstrapped — and we want to grow the brand as quickly as we can, while making smart decisions and not diluting the brand or team or culture.”

One of the ways Frank Darling hopes to grow its business is by opening a larger factory. Currently, the brand produces approximately 20% of its output at a New York City facility it opened last year. The remaining 80% comes from U.S. suppliers, many of which are in New York City and Chicago. But, having a new, larger factory “will allow us to have more control on the manufacturing side,” Fisher said.

“We’ll be able to provide a better post-care experience and faster resizing,” she said. “And, to the extent that we do more proprietary setting styles and design, it allows us to own those internally.”

As Modern Retail has reported, many jewelers have the majority of their supply chains in Asia, especially China, Thailand, Vietnam and India, and are therefore stuck navigating fluctuating tariffs. But Frank Darling is U.S.-based, which gives it a certain amount of flexibility at a time of macroeconomic instability. The company already has a domestic factory, so building a larger one was a “no brainer” for the brand, especially when considering cost benefits, Fisher said.

“There’s always been a degree of physical manufacturing that we’ve done ourselves,” she said. “We finally get to do it in a big way [at Frank Darling], which feels really good.”